Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology—and invents ways to keep itself alive

I find the utility of drawing a distinction between memes and temes questionable. How is our newly IT-centric means of dispersing memes qualitatively different from past technologically-mediated methods? Where do we draw the cutoff? Telephone? Telegraph? Printing press? Megaphone? Smoke signals? And what actual use does this conceptual tool give us that we didn't have before with that of memes? Seems more like an idle observation of "cool, our newfangled tech can enable novel forms of communication."